“You some kind of security guard?” Frank asked, though he knew better. He might have left school midway through the ninth grade, but it wasn’t because he was stupid. His shop teacher had gone to smack Frank alongside the head for fooling around with a band saw for the third time in a day, and Frank had snatched the man’s hand in midair and turned to sling him right on out a second-story window of West Trenton Vocational Tech. The teacher had suffered some cuts from the glass, along with a fractured collarbone and a fair ration of bumps and bruises, but Frank had known the fall wasn’t going to kill him. Throwing him out a third-story window, now that would have been stupid…
As would thinking that a condo security man had been issued a weapon modified in a way that violated several federal firearms statutes. The fact was that the guy up there stood surely on the same side of the law as did Frank and his lamentably absent brother, Basil.
“That’s right,” the guy on the seawall said. “For your security, I’m telling you to get your ass out of here.”
“I can’t,” Frank said. There was a mosquito on the back of his neck inserting what felt like a hot icepick deep into his flesh, but he held off slapping at it, not wanting to do anything to alarm the man with the shotgun.
He was also wondering what was taking Basil so long. On their way down the channel that led to this dockage, they’d spotted the market where his brother had gone off for something to drink. Distances on land were a little deceptive when judged from the perspective of a boat, but surely there’d been plenty of time to walk there and back.
“This isn’t multiple choice, asshole. Get going.” The man had turned so that the shotgun pointed straight down into the Cigarette. He didn’t have his finger on the trigger, but still it was unnerving. Frank had seen what his own brother could do with a weapon just like it, after all.
Very slowly, Frank lifted his hand to point at one of the pilings. “I’m tied off,” he said. “How’m I supposed to go anywhere?”
“We’ll take care of that,” the guy with the shotgun said. He backed carefully toward the piling where the stern line was looped and, keeping the shotgun on Frank, undid the rope with his free hand. Frank heard the soft thump of the rope as it fell onto the deck behind him.
Frank watched carefully as the man moved along the seawall to where the second line was tethered. There was another insect digging into the back of his hand and a third boring a hole in his cheek. “Aren’t the mosquitoes biting you?” he called to the man on the seawall.
The guy undid the forward line and tossed it onto the Cigarette’s prow. “You come back here again, you’re dead meat,” the guy said.
“Sorry to have disturbed you,” Frank said. He was about to reach for the ignition when he saw the dark shape rise up suddenly behind the guy with the shotgun.
“Hey—” the guy said, but the word was quickly cut off, replaced by weird sucking noises that sounded like a pool vacuum with something jammed in its line. The man’s feet were lifted off the ground now, kicking wildly.
Frank saw the shotgun tumble from the man’s hands. He lunged for it, but the thing went into the water with a splash and disappeared. A few moments more, and all was quiet on the seawall again.
***
“Why do you figure he wanted us out of here so bad?” Frank asked, following his brother over the thickly landscaped grounds. In the distance sat the place they were headed for, an interesting-looking building with lots of wood and jutting angles and plenty of smoked glass. Balconies and patios were everywhere, though no one seemed to be outside. All the windows were closed, lights burning golden and cozy behind them, everybody safely tucked away for the night, or so it might seem.
Basil glanced back at the Cigarette where they’d stowed the body, then shrugged. “This’d be a good place to bring in some contraband, don’t you think? Maybe we interrupted us a drug deal.”
“You think?” Frank asked, glancing around.
“Who knows?” Basil shrugged again.
“Maybe we ought to wait around, take it off ourselves.”
Basil stopped then and turned to him, his hands on his hips. “Didn’t we just have this conversation earlier? Keep your eye on the plan, and all that?”
“Like the Zen?”
Basil sighed. “You going to start that again?”
“I was just thinking, that’s all.”
“I told you…”
“Forget it,” Frank said. “I’m focusing as we speak. I am seeing this operation going down exactly as we planned.”
“That’s my little brother,” Basil said, and then they were off again.
Chapter Twenty-one
“You are something else, Osvaldo,” Driscoll said to the powerfully built man in the wheelchair.
“The computer does the work,” Osvaldo said in his soft-spoken way, no false modesty in his voice. He wore a full beard neatly trimmed, his jet black hair pulled back tight into a ponytail. His arms were those of a bodybuilder, his chest swelling the fabric of a sleeveless T-shirt. Though his trouser legs were empty, neatly pressed and pinned just above the knees, he radiated enough energy to make Driscoll feel tired just looking at him.
At the moment, Osvaldo’s gaze was still fixed intently on the glowing screen before him. They’d been tracing through the various reports together, Osvaldo navigating around and over the various computer fire walls constructed by one state agency after another like an eel whisking through a drift fisherman’s nets.
Driscoll turned away to rub at his burning eyes and glanced at the humming printer that was churning out hard copy of the facts they’d so far unearthed. “You’re not surprised he’s a con, are you,” Osvaldo said over his shoulder.
Driscoll shook his head, waiting for a growling eighteen-wheeler to crest the overpass that coursed only a few yards away from Osvaldo’s third-story apartment door. “I didn’t figure him for a killer, though.”
“Maybe he’s not,” Osvaldo said, pushing back from the Formica-clad door that served as his desk.
“You beat a man to death with your bare hands, what does that make you?” Driscoll asked.
Osvaldo shrugged. “An avenger, perhaps…sometimes a martyr.”
Driscoll shook his head. “The law is not a philosopher, Osvaldo.”
“I hear the law is an ass,” Osvaldo countered.
Driscoll glanced at Osvaldo’s empty trouser legs. The law had hardly done this man any favors, now, had it? He turned, gesturing toward the tiny kitchen. “You got any beer?”
Osvaldo nodded. “I keep it just for you.”
Driscoll walked to the refrigerator as another eighteen-wheeler cranked its way up the overpass, then began a spine-rattling series of shifts back down. Six bottles of Jamaican Red Stripe on the bottom shelf, squat brown soldiers, each with a red-and-white label glistening out at him. Osvaldo hadn’t been kidding about who the beer was for, Driscoll thought. The man hadn’t had a drink in better than three years now. Three years and counting.
“Why don’t you find yourself a quieter place, Osvaldo?” Driscoll asked, coming back into the room with an open beer in hand.
“I like it here,” Osvaldo said. “You should come by at rush hour. You open the windows and close your eyes, it sounds just like the surf pounding at the shore.”
“The surf, huh?” Driscoll snorted, as the echo of the eighteen-wheeler died away.
“Besides, they have a good workout room. You ought to see it.”
“I was going to get into exercise once,” Driscoll said. “Then I took a nap and the urge just disappeared.”
“Some nice-looking women come in there,” Osvaldo said.
Driscoll glanced at Osvaldo. He suspected some of the women weren’t visiting the place just to work on their abs. “I guess there’s an upside to everything,” Driscoll said.
“You could start out slow, build up to where you’d like to be,” Osvaldo said.
Driscoll put a hand on his formid
able gut. No six-pack there, he thought. More like a case, a case and a half. “I’m where I like to be already,” Driscoll said. “A high wind comes along, I’m not going anywhere.”
“Suit yourself,” Osvaldo said, raising an eyebrow.
Driscoll had a slug of Red Stripe, thinking briefly about how life would be without beer. What he felt were probably the same emotions as the French philosophers contemplating the abyss. “You remember Leon Straight?” he asked, waving the beer at the growing mound of paper in the printer tray.
“Who doesn’t?” Osvaldo said. “A real bad actor. The Dolphins could use a guy like him these days.”
“Quite a family history,” Driscoll said. “I’m sorry I didn’t meet the old man.”
“You’re not as tough as you like to sound,” Osvaldo said.
“No?” Driscoll raised an eyebrow of his own.
“Deep down, you like to think the best of everybody.”
“Yeah, I’m going to nominate Russell Straight as a teen mentor,” Driscoll said.
“You could have turned your back on me, Driscoll.”
Driscoll made a noise in his throat. “That’s different.”
“No, it’s not,” Osvaldo said.
“You didn’t kill anybody just because they pissed you off. In fact, I believe it was the other way around.”
“Maybe I haven’t so far,” Osvaldo said, staring at him levelly. “But there’s hardly a day that goes by when something happens and I don’t think about it.”
Driscoll waved his beer again. “That’s different, too,” he said.
Osvaldo shook his head. “You sit in this chair all the time, you’d be surprised the thoughts that go through your head.”
“You going to get a rifle, climb up in a tower somewhere?”
“If I could climb, I wouldn’t care about the rifle,” Osvaldo said.
Driscoll felt it like a punch to his formidable gut. “I didn’t mean anything, Osvaldo. You know that.”
“I’m just trying to make a point,” Osvaldo said.
“Point’s made,” Driscoll said.
Osvaldo nodded. “So what are you going to do about Leon Straight’s little brother? Call his parole officer up in Georgia, arrange a pickup?”
Driscoll glanced at him. “First thing, I’ll let Deal know what we found out. The guy’s already assaulted him, for chrissake. Wouldn’t it make you nervous having him around?”
Osvaldo shrugged. “Maybe Deal was right. If Russell Straight meant business, he would have finished the job in the first place.”
“Bleeding hearts are everywhere,” Driscoll said, finishing the Red Stripe. He noted that the printer had finally stopped chunking out the pages. “I’ll tell Deal, then we’ll see. The more important question has to do with this Sams character.”
Osvaldo nodded, but his expression was anything but positive. “The guy is nowhere,” he said. “The name’s a phony. It has to be.” He gave Driscoll a bleak look. “I’m not sure there’s anything else I can do, unless you can come up with more on the guy.”
Driscoll nodded and glanced at the empty in his hand. He could have another, he thought, let the heavy thinking go until morning. Have six or eight more, in fact, see if he couldn’t stretch his already straining belt to a notch in the course of a night. He dropped the empty in the trash basket by Osvaldo’s door-top desk and patted his stomach. “I gotta go, Osvaldo.” He reached for the stack of papers in the printer tray and held them up in thanks. “I appreciate the trouble.”
Osvaldo gave him a look. “I get paid these days, remember?”
“That’s right,” Driscoll said, reaching automatically for his wallet. “How do we stand, anyway?”
Osvaldo held up a hand to stop him. “We have an accounting program now. It cuts checks automatically.”
“No kidding,” Driscoll said. “When did that happen?”
“I told you about it,” Osvaldo said. “Last month.”
Driscoll nodded. “You said something, I guess. This means you control my finances, huh?”
Osvaldo smiled. “Be nice to me, Driscoll.”
Driscoll waved on his way out the door. “It’s a brave new world,” he said.
“Welcome to it,” Osvaldo called back. And Driscoll was out into the night.
Chapter Twenty-two
“I understand you’ve been asking after me,” came the voice over Driscoll’s shoulder. He had just slid behind the wheel of the Ford where he’d parked it in a corner of the always crammed and poorly lit parking lot of Osvaldo’s building, had his seat belt pulled halfway toward the catch.
Fucking A, he thought as a pair of arms encircled him. He’d been as careless as a schmuck civilian. Which, though he was a schmuck civilian these days, hardly qualified as an excuse. Too many days running credit checks and following adulterous businessmen around, he thought, feeling the fabric of the seat belt wrapping his arms, then coiling up under his chin. No real danger, no threat to keep him trim and on his toes. He was pinned back against the headrest of his seat now, choking, gasping for breath. Plenty of danger here. Threat potential plenty high, thank you very much.
“Careful, Tasker,” he heard the voice behind him say. “We don’t want to give the Department a bad name.”
“He’s got a gun.”
Driscoll heard what he assumed was Tasker’s voice, felt a hand sliding beneath the lapels of his coat, sensed his .38 sliding free.
“I’m going to assume you have a permit to carry this,” the purring voice behind him said. “Possession of an unlicensed firearm is a serious matter, you know.”
An armed citizenry is a polite citizenry, Driscoll wanted to tell the man.
Something he’d read somewhere recently. But his voice wasn’t working at the moment. Strangled by his own seat belt, he found himself thinking, What a way to go. Maybe they’d chisel it on his headstone.
“Let him breathe, Tasker,” the voice came.
Driscoll felt the pressure at his throat lessen. The sensation was accompanied by the press of something cold and steely under his ear. Shot with his own gun, he was thinking. The very worst fate of all.
“Is that you, Sams?”
“We can use that name if it suits you,” the voice came. “By now I’m sure you realize that it refers to no one, truly.”
“There’s an eighty-two-year-old minister who’d puke if he knew you were using it,” Driscoll said.
“Do tell,” the voice said. “I’d like to know why you were so interested in finding me.”
“I’m a private investigator,” Driscoll said. “That’s privileged information.”
“Are you charging your friend and business partner, then?” Sams said, his voice as mellifluous as a radio announcer’s. “Has John Deal put you up to this?”
When Driscoll didn’t respond, the seat belt at his throat coiled tighter. “If you know everything, why bother asking?” Driscoll managed.
“There are also significant penalties for interfering with a government investigation,” Sams continued. “You could find yourself in very serious trouble.”
“That means I’m doing fine right now?”
“I don’t need your interference,” Sams said. Driscoll thought that a certain hiss of anger had crept into the man’s voice. “Now tell me what you’re after.”
“That’s pretty obvious, isn’t it? You break into a guy’s office, threaten to blackmail him unless he engages in some industrial espionage on your behalf. Why wouldn’t he want to find out who you really are?”
“I identified myself, I assure you,” Sams said.
“Maybe it didn’t seem too convincing, the way you conduct your business and all,” Driscoll said.
“I’m trying to apprehend one of the more elusive fugitives from justice,” Sams said. “It’s hardly the sort of thing that’s handled under the sunshine laws.”
“So it would seem,” Driscoll said, struggling to swallow. “But
I don’t think the Justice Department would condone blackmail.”
Sams laughed dryly. “I’m certain you never did anything of the kind when you were trying to gain the cooperation of an informant, detective.”
“I leaned on scumbags, if that’s what you mean,” Driscoll told him. “Deal’s no scumbag. Just the opposite, in fact. He’d do a hell of a lot better for himself if he wasn’t so honest.”
“It’s a wonderful cover story, that much I’ll grant you,” Sams said.
“What are you talking about?” Driscoll asked.
“It’s my experience that the apple rarely falls far from the tree,” Sams replied. “Or to put it another way, like father, like son.”
Driscoll found himself struggling against the restraints at his arms. “If you think John Deal is crooked, you’re crazy,” he said. “And if you think he’s just going to roll over and do what you tell him, you’re crazier still.”
“Oh, I think he will,” Sams said. “Particularly if he’s made of the stuff you seem to think he is. He’d never want to see harm befall those he cares about—”
“You’re no government agent,” Driscoll said, still struggling at his bonds.
“Such a naïve man,” Sams said. “But this has been a useful conversation after all. I do believe you’re motivated by your fervent belief in Mr. Deal. Perhaps he’s sold you a bill of goods, or perhaps your vision of the man is an accurate one. Either way, I’m going to get what I’m after.”
“And what’s that, Sams?” Driscoll demanded.
“It doesn’t matter,” Sams replied calmly. “You’ve served your purpose, I’m afraid. We’re only wasting time.”
Driscoll felt the chill the words conveyed and tried to struggle free. But suddenly the pressure at his throat was tremendous. And then the lights went out.
Chapter Twenty-three
“Come on, Janice,” Deal said, speaking to himself.
Deal with the Dead Page 18